OK Computer

the blank cheque

Between 1993 and the end of the OK Computer tour in 1998, Radiohead had one month off, January 1996, as Ed O'Brien counted it for Rolling Stone twenty years later. Thom Yorke had told NME in December 1995 that he did not want to make another miserable record and was writing down the positive things he heard and saw. Phil Selway said doing the soul-searching of The Bends again would be excruciatingly boring.

The success of The Bends gave them the nerve to produce the next one themselves. Producers were suggested, Scott Litt among them, but the band wanted the engineer who had cut “Lucky” with them for a War Child record the September before, Nigel Godrich. Parlophone gave them about £100,000 to spend on recording equipment, and Godrich helped choose it; one item was a plate reverb bought from Jona Lewie, the man behind “Stop the Cavalry”. Yorke's version of the deal, told in 2017, was that the label said “Whatever you want, mate, you got it”, and the band asked for their own gear, their own studio and Nigel.

Take as long as you want, record it wherever you want, with whoever you want.

parlophone, as quoted in capitol's ok computer press kit, july 1997

The spring W.A.S.T.E. newsletter, the band's own mail-order and fan club, had all five of them writing about it. Selway admitted to feelings that ran from extreme excitement to bowel-shattering terror.

the apple shed

They started at the end of January 1996 in Canned Applause, their rehearsal room in a roughly converted apple shed on a farm near Didcot. The name came from a competition in the W.A.S.T.E. newsletter. Most of the songs got their arrangements there, and some went out on the road to be played in: five weeks in North America in March, the summer festivals, and a headline set at T in the Park that EMI's press pack later quoted back as making stadium rock credible again. Offered the top of the bill at Reading and Phoenix that summer, they said no, and Yorke told the fan club he was proud of it.

By July Godrich had a mobile studio running in the shed. Colin Greenwood's account for the American press kit says four songs on the album came out of it, and that the first take on the first day was the one that stayed. The shed was too close to home and short of a kitchen and a toilet, and Selway remembered them jumping from song to song and leaving each one nearly finished.

Then they went back to America to open for Alanis Morissette, a run of amphitheatres from 12 August where the crowds knew “Creep” and nothing else. That freed them to play the new songs to people with no expectations. Colin remembered Jones Beach on Long Island: the band in black, scowling, the mums in the seats and preteen girls starting to cry. One new song went down better than the others, a light strummer with a huge chorus called “Lift”, and it was left off the album. The Hartford date on 20 August turned up on the sleeve later.

st catherine's court

Days after the Morissette tour ended, the equipment went to St Catherine's Court, an Elizabethan manor in a secluded valley outside Bath that belonged to the actress Jane Seymour. As an American resident she could spend only 90 days a year in England, so the house was let when she was away; the Cure had made Wild Mood Swings there. Select put the rent at £10,000 a week. Yorke had told the fan club in August that it had twenty toilets and was extremely haunted.

They played in the ballroom, wood-panelled, with a medieval hanging on one wall, while Godrich recorded them from the library across a corridor. The nursery at the top of the house, full of soft toys, was a good-sounding room, and many of the vocals went down in the orangery in the garden. Godrich had no assistant. The roadie Peter Clements, known as Plank, helped him carry things, and that was the crew.

It was the seven of us plus the cook and Mango, Jane's cat.

nigel godrich · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

They were there twice, in September and again from November, with October spent rehearsing at home. In the first week, Yorke told Select, nobody left the house, and walking in the gardens at night with the music coming out of the house he could hear vixens yowling. Colin said the one day out, in Bath, felt like being released by kidnappers into a shopping centre. Seymour had held séances there, and nobody found anything. Selway wrote in the next newsletter that by the end it felt a little too much like The Shining.

Most of what they recorded there was played live by the five of them in a room. Colin put it at 80 per cent of the album in 1997, with a few songs “live bits glued together”, and O'Brien gave the same figure to Guitar Player. A page of Godrich's notebook from these sessions, which he posted in 2017, is about “True Love Waits”, which did not make the record either. At the end of the second stay, he said, they felt they had used the house up.

london, and stopping

By Christmas they had fourteen songs almost done. The rest was finished in London in January and February 1997, with more recording at the Church in Crouch End, the strings at Abbey Road in January, arranged by the band and conducted by Nick Ingman, and what the sleeve calls audio fixing and dubbing at Mayfair, Air Lyndhurst and Courtyard, the studio their managers ran. Godrich mixed fast, about half a day a song, because longer than that and he started fiddling.

It could have gone on. Yorke told Select that Jonny Greenwood walked into the studio in January and said that was it, they had to stop now, which left Yorke with the running order and the slow realisation that no order would feel entirely right. Chris Blair finished mastering at Abbey Road on 6 March 1997. Colin wrote to the fan club three days after they finished: almost a year's work, with two American tours and a run of festivals in the middle of it.

Two of the fourteen, “Polyethylene” and “A Reminder”, became B-sides to “Paranoid Android”. “Lift”, “I Promise” and “Man of War” were recorded and left in the drawer, which is where the label would have looked for singles.

So I think probably, initially, we probably wrong-footed quite a few people.

phil selway · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

the colour of bleached bone

Yorke asked Stanley Donwood to keep a visual diary while the band recorded, and said later he did not trust the music until he could see a picture of it. Donwood lived in Bath and cycled over to St Catherine's Court to work. He scanned in what he found, things picked up in the street, scraps of text and an aeroplane safety card Yorke had taken off a flight, and layered it on a computer; mistakes were painted out in white rather than undone, and the white scribbles are all over the finished pages. Yorke worked with him as The White Chocolate Farm.

We layered it all together and then tried to obliterate it, almost like a terrible criminal trying to conceal the evidence of what he did.

stanley donwood · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

Donwood remembered wanting it white because he had the mistaken idea that white was the colour of death in some culture or other; elsewhere he described the palette as an attempt at the colour of bleached bone. He did not remember where the motorway on the cover came from. In 2017 it was traced to the junction of Interstate 84 and Interstate 91 in Hartford, Connecticut, the city of that Morissette date.

The booklet sets the lyrics in typewriter text with the spelling bent out of shape, among pages of Esperanto (“DANGERA NAJBAR-AJO”), health advice in English and Greek, and two stick figures shaking hands, which Yorke said meant someone being sold something they did not want. The back page is a pencil sketch with the running order written out by hand beside it. On the back cover “Fitter Happier” has no line of its own: it sits in small type beside “Karma Police” as a footnote, and the double LP named its four sides eeny, meeny, miney and mo. The credits have “artistic freedom in the market place” maintained by Keith Wozencroft and Tony Wadsworth, and print the copyright line “lyrics used by kind permission even though we wrote them”.

full manual control

On the bus in 1996 the band listened to the radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which Zaphod Beeblebrox says “Okay, computer, I want full manual control now”, and Yorke wrote the phrase down. It was first the working title of the B-side “Palo Alto”. Jonny Greenwood said it then started attaching itself to everything they were doing, and Yorke called it a resigned, terrified phrase. The titles it beat included Ones and Zeroes and Your Home May Be at Risk If You Do Not Keep Up Payments.

a walkman glued shut

The labels did not agree about what they had. Parlophone's managing director, Tony Wadsworth, told Billboard that everything that had worked for Radiohead had broken the rules. In America Capitol heard no single; the band's manager Chris Hufford remembered the word “disappointed”, and the American sales forecast went from two million to half a million. Colin Greenwood told Melody Maker he worried it would lose people who loved The Bends.

So Capitol did something odd with it. A thousand people in the American media were sent a Walkman with the cassette sealed inside, playable only on the headphones in the box, so that they would hear the album whole. There were screensavers on floppy disk and an FM radio shaped like a desktop computer. Radiohead.com went live with the record. In Britain Radio 1 gave the band a whole day on 10 June.

Japan had it first, on 21 May 1997, through EMI's Toshiba label. The next night the band played the launch at the Zeleste in Barcelona to EMI staff from around the world, and the day of interviews after it was Selway's thirtieth birthday, marked with a cake handed round the journalists. Parlophone released it in Britain on Monday 16 June on CD, cassette, MiniDisc and double LP, and it went in at number one with 136,476 copies sold in its first week, ahead of Jon Bon Jovi; it stayed two weeks. Capitol's release followed on 1 July, and it entered the Billboard 200 at 21. It was gold in America by December and platinum by May 1998.

the reviews and the prizes

James Oldham gave it 10 in NME and called it a landmark record of the 1990s; David Cavanagh's Q review called it “a landmark on every latitude”. In Mojo Nick Kent bet that in twenty years it would be seen as the key record of 1997. In America Mark Kemp in Rolling Stone took it for a concept album about computers, and Alex Ross, in The New Yorker, set it against the Britpop that had earned the nickname dadrock. Not everyone signed up. Andy Gill in The Independent found it hard to love and preferred The Bends. Robert Christgau gave it a B minus in the Village Voice. Paul Morley, protesting at the arrival of star ratings in Uncut, gave it one star and then spent the rest of the review naming it.

It was the best album of the year for Mojo, Vox and Entertainment Weekly, and NME's readers voted it best album in January 1998, the night Yorke fluffed the acceptance video five times and Jonny did it in one. It lost the Mercury Prize to Roni Size and Reprazent's New Forms as the bookmakers' favourite, the chair of the judges calling it a classic on his way to explaining why it had not won. At the Grammys in February 1998 it won Best Alternative Music Performance and lost Album of the Year to Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind. The band did not play the ceremony; Yorke told Triple J the organisers had said they were not good for the ratings.

Most of the reviews heard a record about computers and the future. By Colin's count four fifths of it was the five of them playing together in a room, and that is what it still sounds like.

against demons

The tour was called Against Demons, the words written under a star on the CD's tray card. It started in Barcelona on 22 May 1997, took in their first Glastonbury headline set on 28 June, crossed Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia, and ended at Radio City Music Hall in New York on 18 April 1998. Grant Gee went with them with a camera, and the film he made of it, Meeting People Is Easy, opened in London in November 1998.

they were quiet and articulate people being put through this industrial process of sort of being vacuumed for image and information and quotes and thoughts.

grant gee · rolling stone, 16 june 2017

Yorke said he was doing five interviews a day and in the end could not manage one before a concert. Colin remembered him at his lowest at the British arena shows in November 1997. When it was over Yorke was due in New York to see Godrich and Michael Stipe mixing R.E.M.'s Up. They went to JFK to meet him, and he was not on the plane; he had turned round on the way to the airport and gone home.

oknotok and the minidiscs

EMI kept the record when the band's contract ended in 2003, and in 2009 put out a Collector's Edition with a disc of B-sides and a DVD, without asking them. XL took over the catalogue in 2016. The band's own twentieth-anniversary edition, OKNOTOK 1997 2017, came out on 23 June 2017, the day they headlined Glastonbury again, remastered from the analogue tapes with the B-sides and, at last, “Lift”, “I Promise” and “Man of War”. Before it was announced, posters printed with lines from “Fitter Happier” went up in several cities with no name on them. The box had a picture of a burned copy of the album on the lid, 104 pages of Yorke's notebooks and a C90 of demos, and the end of the tape is a ZX Spectrum program, dated 19 December 1996, that puts the band's names on screen. The vinyl is dedicated to Rachel Owen, Yorke's former partner of 23 years, who had died the previous December. It went in at number two, behind Ed Sheeran.

In June 2019 about eighteen hours of Yorke's MiniDiscs from the period leaked online. The band put the lot on Bandcamp for 18 days as MiniDiscs [Hacked], the money going to Extinction Rebellion. The Library of Congress added the album to the National Recording Registry in 2015, and the Recording Academy put it in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2026.

Christgau's review in 1997 guaranteed that “it will not occupy the charts for 10 years”. In September 2026, in its 309th week on the UK album sales chart, it climbed 25 places.